How Baking Cakes Saved This Boomer From Foreclosure---And Spawned A Side-Business

It was an especially sweet moment for Angela Logan when the Teaneck, N.J. town council handed her the official proclamation of “Angela Logan Day,” after the April 10th premiere there of a TV movie about her life.

“That was the topper,” says the 60-year-old single mother of three, who couldn’t help crying while watching Apple Mortgage Cake. (She appears in a cameo role as a charity’s supervisor.)

The movie dramatizes Logan’s frenetic efforts to save her Teaneck home from foreclosure by baking hundreds of apple cakes. It premieres Sunday, April 20 on the UP cable network — formerly the Gospel Music Channel — and re-airs later in April and in May. The Up site, whose focus is uplifting entertainment, has dates and times.

Logan’s 10-day epic cake-baking marathon made her a celebrity before it made her solvent. And therein lies the drama.

In the summer of 2009, Logan was one of more than 2 million Americans facing foreclosure and fast running out of options.

The actress and occasional substitute teacher faced cascading crises after the recession hit: Her talent agency went under, her freelance teaching and modeling jobs dried up and a botched renovation left Logan with an unsafe home and a massive shortfall in her finances.

Her Hail Mary-pass solution: She’d bake 100 apple cakes in 10 days at $40 a pop and use the money for mortgage payments to stave off foreclosure. This not only worked, it soon became national news, which then led to the film.

“You feel like it should be a movie, and then it is a movie,” Logan told The Record, the New Jersey paper that first wrote about her cake-baking quest. Kimberly Elise (Beloved, For Colored Girls) plays Logan.

These days, Logan teaches physical education full time at a charter school in Newark and bakes “in every spare minute” at a rented commercial kitchen in Hawthorne, N.J. for her company, Mortgage Apple Cakes.

She hadn’t planned on it. In July 2009, after months of delays, Logan learned that she could take advantage of a federal mortgage modification program that she applied for with the help of a credit counselor. Just one catch: She needed to come up with the first of three $2,559 mortgage payments owed to her lender.

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